I-12: Jolley – Cultural Influences on Children's Drawings

"Early work into describing age-related representational changes in children’s drawings was. conducted with little awareness of cultural variations in children's choice of subject matter and the forms in which they drew them. In this chapter I provide evidence from children’s drawings around the world that such cultural variations exist, and consequently how they seriously undermine any view of a universal developmental pattern of drawing, and that standardized drawing tests are cultur-free. As ist he case oft he drawings themselves the cultural influences on the observed differences are many and varied. I have categorized these influences as art in the culture and education, formal schooling, drawing models, environment, lifestyle, and cultural values. Caution must be applied at all timest o causal interpretations of influence, however, as much oft he works in this area is observational by nature, and hence our understanding of the precise cultural influence is often speculative. [...]

Much of the ealrly scientific work on children's drawings, published arround the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attempted to describe age-related changes in children's representational drawings [...]. In these early developmental accounts there appears to have been little recognition of how children from different cultures draw. Even in Luquet's (1927/2001) influential book on children's drawings he did not give even one sentence to the issue of cultural variation. Such a lack of appreciation of cultural differences was more worryingly evident in Florence Goodenough's (1926) "Draw-a-Man" test which was designed as a measure of a child 's intelligence. The poverty of public collections of drawings made by children around the world led to an implicit assumption of a universal developmental pattern in drawing, and even as recent as 1970 DiLeo claimed that the "Draw-a-Man" test is still the best available culture-free test of intelligence.

When worldwide collections of children's drawings did become available it was apparent that there were marked differences in what children drew and how they drew them. In an early and important publication that highlighted cultural variations Paget (1932) reported findings from an enormous collection of over 60,000 children's drawings, mostly of the human figure, from around the world but particularly from children living in remote areas of Africa and Asia. [...] For instance, Paget's collection included blocked-in figures [...] , stick figures [...], and bi-triangular bodies [...]. These shapes are in contrast to the forms (oval, rectangular, triangle, and contoured) typically found in Western children's human figure drawing [...]. Paget also found drawings in which the facial features were not shown within a head contour [...]. Even more different were the chainlike figures in which the features of the human figure are drawn in a list on a vertical axis [...]. Genitalia and breasts were frequently found in Paget's collection [...]. In another published collection, Fortes (1940) found that genitalia were commonly seen in drawings among the African Tallensi people. The presence of genitalia no doubt reflects the more open views (literally!) found in some cultures to the display of sexual body parts, and should not be regarded as a sign of disturbance or sexual abuse as is commonly interpreted in the relatively rare instances of genitalia found in Western children's drawings.

As cross-cultural collections of children's drawings became more widely available the implicit assumption of a universal pattern of drawing development began to be challenged. As Cox (1993, 1998) states, the diversity of drawing styles shown in human figure drawings alone indicates that there is not a natural way of drawing a person and that the variety of structures represent different solutions. Furthermore, as I shall comment upon later, human figure drawings are not drawn frequently in some cultures, with other subject matter more commonly found that reflect the different interests of the children in those cultures. When we view drawings from around the world, therefore, we should not impose Western criteria in our assessment of what is drawn and how it is drawn, but instead use it as an opportunity to understand the diversity of cultural influences and symbols that impact upon children's drawings." (Jolley, 2010, p. 247-250; for examples of the human figures described in the text, see p. 248.)

"Cultural influence on children 's drawings presents a difficult research area but I believe further studies would be usefully employed investigating two central issues that are as yet largely unaddressed in the literature. First, what commonalities and differences are there in the ways in which children develop their cultural symbols across the world? Second, what is the nature of the interaction between children's own graphic inventions and their borrowing ideas from the available drawing models on children's drawing development?

Considering the commonalities/differences question, some of the studies discussed [...] have reported different graphic structures across the world. The 'horseshoe-shaped' person found in aboriginal children's drawings is one such example. An initial research question would be to establish whether within each of the cultural graphic forms and structures we see an age-related pattern in children’s drawings? Or is it the case that a near-adult like version is acquired by young children with little subsequent adaptation? In cases where the drawing of cultural structural forms does develop with age are there any common principles of progression between cultures?

We have long since discovered that it does not make sense to argue whether a developmental phenomena is explained by nature or nurture. Similarly, we should be careful not to see drawing development as explained solely in terms of children's graphic inventions or borrowing from drawing models. After all, the drawing models have to be invented in the first place. Likewise, there may be few examples of radically new graphic symbols that are not in some way influenced by existing models. The really interesting question is the relative influence of invention and copying on children's drawing development and how the two interact with each other. As far back as the Wilson and Wilson (1977) paper we saw a promising line of research in which the authors interviewed children on the origin of their current and past drawings. Unfortunately, neither this or alternative approaches have been developed to provide empirical data to answer the question of how graphic inventions and borrowing from drawing models interact in children's drawing development." (Jolley, 2010, p. 270-271)